“She did. Actually, she married my dad’s brother, my uncle Charlie.” I smiled. “Charlie was a fine man. Treated me like a son. I thought of him as my dad; I called him Dad. Although . . .” I hesitated again. “The older I get, the more I miss my father; the more I wonder what kind of relationship I could have had with him. It makes me feel a little disloyal to Charlie, but I miss my father.”
“Nothing disloyal about that,” she said. “There’s room in a heart for a lot of people. I’ve got another sister, Genevieve—the oldest—who’s still alive. Would I have more love to give Genevieve if I didn’t still feel love for Kate? I don’t think it works that way. I think it works the other way around—I think I’ve got a bigger heart for Gen because of Kate. And I bet you’ve got a bigger heart for Charlie because it’s growing to take in more of your father. Loss can make you smaller, or it can make you bigger. Just depends on what you do after it.” She dabbed at her eyes, then looked at the ruins of her napkin and laughed. “God, they really do need better napkins at this place.”
I lifted my paper cup of iced tea. “Here’s to getting bigger, not smaller.”
She reached for her cup, but didn’t lift it. “You mean that?” There was a mischievous gleam in her eye.
“I do.”
“Let’s see about that.” Letting go of the cup, she lifted another oyster from the tray and held it toward me. “To getting bigger, not smaller.”
“Uh-oh,” I said. “There’s no graceful way out of this for me, is there?”
“The best way out is all the way in.” She grinned.
I studied the remaining oysters. My inclination was to reach again for the smallest. Instead, I forced myself to take a big one. I spooned on a dab of horseradish and squeezed a lemon wedge over it, as I’d seen Angie do, and then—for good measure—sprinkled a dollop of cocktail sauce on top. I lifted it by the edges, careful not to slosh the brine. “To bigger, not smaller,” I said, clicking my oyster shell against hers. I brought the shell to my lips, feeling the roughness of its outside against my lower lip and the pearly smoothness of the inner shell against my top lip. The shell was cold from the bed of crushed ice in the platter. As I tipped the shell slowly, the brine—salty, lemony, and tangy—trickled into my mouth.
“Don’t think about it,” Angie coached from across the table. “Just do it.” I tipped the shell higher, and the oyster slithered into my mouth. “Chew three times, then swallow.” The memory of my one prior oyster tasting came rushing back, and I nearly gagged, but then I bit down, and my distaste and fear were swept away by a wave of flavor and texture that somehow seemed to embody the ocean itself: salty, clean, and—to my amazement—light and slightly crisp. How could an oyster—a mollusk, for heaven’s sake—be light and crisp and clean?
I laid the shell down slowly. “So,” she said, “what do you think?”
“I think maybe you’re right,” I said. “I think we might need two dozen.”
We were just polishing off the first dozen when Angie’s phone rang. “Hi, Stu. Yeah, we’re still here. Y’all come on. But you better hurry. I’m not sure how well stocked Shell’s is, and our friend here has decided he likes oysters.”
Vickery brought with him a patrician-looking man who could have been either a well-used sixty or a youthful seventy. He wore silver hair, black suspenders, a red bow tie, and alert, sparkling eyes. He extended a hand as Vickery made a no-nonsense introduction. “Dr. Bill Brockton; Dr. Albert Goldman.” I wiped the oyster brine from my hand and shook. “Dr. Goldman teaches law and criminology at FSU’s Center for the Advancement of Human Rights,” Vickery told me, although Angie had already briefed me on his credentials while we were waiting, “and one of his specialties is juvenile justice. If anybody can give you the skinny on reform schools in the 1950s and ’60s, it’s Al.”
Goldman shook my hand, then eyed the last two oysters on our plate hungrily. “I hope you told them to save a few dozen of those for me.”
“I can’t promise it,” I said. “You’ve been welcome to my share up to now, but we might be competing from here on out.”
He grinned. “I’ve been a regular here for thirty years. I might have a slight edge if the supply runs short.”
Goldman and Vickery squeezed into chairs alongside Angie and me at the cramped table. Goldman craned his head in search of our waitress, but she was busy with another table at the moment. “Stu’s been guest-lecturing in my criminology classes for the last, what, ten years or so?”